By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Published: April 17, 1994

FEELING pretty good after finally junking that rusty, dented kitchenette unit with the strange drawers? Then don't read on.

The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., just bought a similar kitchenette that it values at $80,000. The museum found the kitchen in an apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, and it is looking for another.

The kitchen purchased by the museum was designed by Guyon L. C. Earle, a Queens developer, in the late 30's. Buckminster Fuller later bought two for his futuristic Dymaxion Houses, prefab aluminum structures that the architect hoped would revolutionize the domestic landscape.

In late 1946, Fuller's Dymaxion Dwelling Corporation built two prototypes of the flying-saucer-like house that had round, revolving closets and a giant weather vane/ventilator on the roof and that weighed only three tons, a small fraction of the weight of a conventional two-bedroom house.

According to Christian Overland, a collection specialist at the Henry Ford Museum, Mayor H. Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis began negotiating in 1946 for 2,500 Dymaxion Houses to solve the city's postwar housing shortage.

Although about 30,000 people inquired about the Dymaxion, internal company disputes prevented actual production and William L. Graham, one of the investors, bought the prototypes for his own family in Wichita, Kan. One was to live in, the other was kept for parts.

In 1992 his family donated its house to the Henry Ford Museum, which also includes among its exhibits a lunar exploration module, a collection of locomotives and the Wright brothers' house and bicycle shop.

The museum is meticulously restoring the Dymaxion House, scheduled to be opened to the public in 1995, but it had no kitchen. Tracing original correspondence, Mr. Overland identified Reynolds Metals as the fabricator and Earle as the designer.

EARLE worked in the family real estate firm, which developed the apartment house at 6 Burns Street in Forest Hills, across from the West Side Tennis Club, around 1920.

In 1939 Earle decided to update the kitchens in the Tudor-style building with a new idea he had been tinkering with -- the one-piece, all-metal "One-Wall Kitchen of Beauty, Quality and Equipment."

When closed up it looks like any other bank of kitchen cabinets. But inside the doors and drawers are oven equipment, towel racks, a roll-out refrigerator, silver compartments, vents and concealed lighting.

The heat from the refrigerator compressor dried the towels and the dishes, and the oven was vented through charcoal filters. Some photographs show the kitchens concealed by a bank of Venetian blinds.

Mr. Overland says that fewer than 1,000 of the Earle kitchens were actually produced, and in December he began searching for a duplicate kitchen, which he knew had been installed somewhere in Forest Hills, for the museum's Dymaxion House.

A research analyst at the Queens Historical Society, James Driscoll, identified the building at 6 Burns Street (where Fuller occupied an apartment in the late 40's while developing the geodesic dome) as a likely place to find one of the kitchens, and contacted the superintendent, Jerry DiMuro. Mr. DiMuro in turn led Mr. Overland to the only surviving Earle kitchen left in the building, in a one-bedroom apartment that is going on sale later this year.

THE kitchen unit is dingy, dented and painted gray, and it has lost its refrigerator -- the old freezer compartment is now the liquor closet. The original dishrack, oven, compressor, handles and other elements are still in place, but even a kitchen enthusiast might pass it by as yet another prefab kitchenette, a trendy design goal in the World War II period.

Mr. Overland says the museum will remove the unit from 6 Burns Street next month. He won't divulge the purchase price, but he says that reconstructing the original kitchen -- which had been their fallback position -- would have cost "at least $80,000."

Back in Dearborn, a team of conservators will take five to six weeks to analyze the original paint finish, replicate missing features, reconstruct the refrigerator and even rebuild and, they hope, restart the compressor.

Earle promoted his kitchen extensively in the 40's, hoping to make a deal to produce it. But after the Dymaxion project fell through it appears he gave up the effort.

Mr. Overland recently got a Dymaxion bathroom in Philadelphia and is looking for a second and maybe even a third Earle kitchen, one for parts, and another that visitors can actually handle. Anyone with an Earle kitchen for sale may write him, enclosing a photograph of it, at the Henry Ford Museum, 2000 Oakwood Boulevard, Dearborn, Mich. 48121.

Photos: One of the Earle kitchens in a Forest Hills apartment in 1939. (The Lincoln Collection, Pennsylvania State University); Modified Earle kitchen recently at 6 Burns Street in Forest Hills. (Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times)